


Explore

by skyholdherbalist



Series: Holystone [3]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-09
Updated: 2018-07-09
Packaged: 2019-06-07 16:26:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15223088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skyholdherbalist/pseuds/skyholdherbalist





	Explore

In Crestwood, the lake sloshed into the muck and swamped the spindleweed.  Dories bobbed, wrecked and water-logged, at the shore.  And at the center the rift threw its green mist against the moon.  

Bryn slipped on a broken pier where the churning lake overtook the planks.  Lightning flashed the dark sky purple as he clung to a splintered post.  His fingers sank deep into the wood, and his legs plunged into the water, strangely warm.  The waves lapped at his stomach.

Cassandra pulled him up, her hands hooked tight under his arms.  Rain had soaked her.  Her wet eyelashes flashed, an echo of the moonlight.  

When the rift was closed, the storm passed.  From a parapet at Caer Bronach, Bryn’s eyes followed a winding mountain path dotted with druffalo and dandelions.  In the distance, a dragon spiraled across the sky.  

—

In Emprise du Lion, ice hung in the air, upon the trees, dripped from the bridges.  The frozen stillness slowed breath and time.  White, everywhere, so white and fixed it made Bryn tired.

Where there was not white, there was red: crimson canvas tents along the fortress walls, flaming jewels of jagged red lyrium, blood spilled upon the snow.  

Bryn smashed the locks of the cages at the quarry when he could not pick them.  He would have smashed the bars, or asked Vivienne to melt them.  Instead she made bonfires of the empty crates and broken walkways.  The freed captives gathered around them until they were warm enough to walk.

Once the great dragon across the bridge was defeated, Bryn stripped, and sank into the steaming springs.  His companions, a hardy but prudish lot, did not join him there.  But he spied Cassandra kneel at the bank, remove one leather glove, and drift her hand across the warm water’s surface.

—

In the Exalted Plains, in Dirthavaren, the air was choked with smoke and dust.  Trees burned, the earth smoldered, black.  Everything felt dead, or haunted, the ash of war smothering the ground.  

Bryn did not like it there.

He couldn't stand the Chevaliers who would strut atop their stolen fortresses like garish feathered cocks, and crow for their cause.

Even less did he like burning pits of bodies and having to pretend they were not once men like himself.

He disliked the Dalish there, whose pigheaded Keeper should have absorbed them into another clan years ago. They would die there, die as a clan or die altogether, caught between Orlesian armies.

What he liked was Ghilan'nain's Grove.  The still brown water, dotted with lily pads and mossy rocks.  The towers of weathered stone which circled and protected.  The fog which slunk around those towers and beneath felled trees.  The halla statues from another time, proud and tall.

Bryn liked night at camp, when the world was dark, and though the smoke of death faintly lingered, he could not see its charred remains.  He sat by a new fire, warm and giving.  He told Cassandra the tale of Ghilan'nain, and of Andruil, and he liked how she listened, how she sighed and smiled.


End file.
